1. Field of the Invention
In general, the present invention relates to geofencing of vehicles by means of telematics. More particular, the present invention relates to an infrastructure comprising means for monitoring a vehicle's geographical position, means for storing geofence data, means for comparing the vehicle's position with said geofence data to determine geofence violation, and means to trigger a predefined action in case of geofence violation. Besides, the present invention relates to a corresponding method for geofencing of vehicles.
2. Description of the Related Art
Geofencing of vehicles means restricting the allowed movement of a vehicle to or within a specified area. There is a growing demand for low-priced but effective implementations of geofencing for different applications. For instance, car rental agencies and leasing car companies use geofencing as vehicle theft protection. In this case the country boarders e.g., of the European Union may be defined as geofences. Other potential users are fleet operators, airports and airport fleet operators which improve their logistics by the help of geofencing. Here, the borders of the company site may be provided as geofences. Yet another important application for geofencing is supervising the transport of assets with value, like money cash transports or delivery vans for medical equipment, medicine, blood, etc. In this case the geofences may define a routing corridor the vehicle must follow. As mentioned before, the particular applications of geofencing vary in the predefined set of geofences, on the one hand. On the other hand, these applications may vary in the predefined actions in case of geofence violation. So, one triggered action may be generating an alarm or, in case of geofencing as vehicle theft protection or supervising the transport of assets with value, even immobilizing the vehicle.
To realize geofencing of a vehicle, this vehicle's geographical position has to be monitored and compared to the geofence data of the specific application.
It is well known in the art to equip vehicles with a GPS receiver for monitoring the vehicle's geographical position. Besides this onboard unit, the vehicle's telematics device provides a processor and a RAM memory. For reasons of cost optimization the processor is usually very resource constrained and the RAM memory is also very limited. As geofence violation detection requires an amount of processing power and RAM memory exceeding the possibilities of the standard telematics equipment of most vehicles, it is usually processed on a backend system. Therefore, the vehicle's telematics device collects and stores position data on the device. This data is transmitted to the backend system in regular intervals, where it is processed for geofence monitoring. This strategy causes an immense data traffic and consequently, a huge amount of telecommunication costs. Besides, this geofence violation detection can not be performed in real-time. The cost optimized telematics devices installed in most vehicles only allow the monitoring of very few and very simple geofences onboard and in real-time.
To summarize the section above, cost optimized telematics devices, as usually installed in vehicles, do not provide an acceptable solution for monitoring a noteworthy amount of very complex geofences in real-time, as it is asked for by most clients. Thus, the present invention provides a cost effective onboard infrastructure for geofencing of vehicles which is able to monitor a large amount of complex geofences. The present invention also provides a reliable method for geofencing of vehicles in real-time.